The term mystic is derived from the Greek noun mystes, which originally designated an initiate of a secret cult or mystery religion. In Classical Greece (5th–4th century bce) and during the Hellenistic Age (323 bce–330 ce), the rites of the mystery religions were largely or wholly secret. The term mystes is itself derived from the verb myein (“to close,” especially the eyes or mouth) and signified a person who kept a secret. Early Christianity appropriated the technical vocabulary of the Hellenistic mysteries but later disavowed secrecy, resulting in a transformation of the meaning of mystes. In subsequent Christian usage, mystes, or mystic, referred to practitioners of doctrinally acceptable forms of religious ecstasy.

The traditional conception of mysticism

From late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Christians used prayer to contemplate both God’s omnipresence in the world and God in his essence. The soul’s ecstasy, or rapture, in contemplation of God was termed a “spiritual marriage” by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest mystical authority of the 12th century. In the 13th century the term unio mystica (Latin: “mystical union”) came into use as a synonym. During the same period the range of objects of contemplation was increased to include the Passion of Christ, visions of saints, and tours of heaven and hell. In the 17th and 18th centuries the enthusiasms of quaking, shaking, and other infusions of the Holy Spirit were also called mystical.

In the mid-19th century, after the Romantic movement had shifted the emphasis in much religious thinking from theology to individual experience, a growing interest in ecumenism led to the invention of the term mysticism and its extension to comparable phenomena in non-Christian religions. The competition between the perspectives of theology and science resulted in a compromise in which most varieties of what had traditionally been called mysticism were dismissed as merely psychological phenomena and only one variety, which aimed at union with the Absolute, the Infinite, or God—and thereby the perception of its essential unity or oneness—was claimed to be genuinely mystical.

The historical evidence, however, does not support such a narrow conception of mysticism. Even within the history of Christianity there were mystics—such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the 5th century and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing in the 14th—for whom the most desirable mystical experience or perception was not of unity but rather of nothing, or nothingness. Thus, St. Bonaventure, in addition to encouraging a program of mystical union with Christ in his death and resurrection, also recommended devotion to the wholly transcendent nothingness of Pseudo-Dionysius’s theology. In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart, along with his followers Heinrich Suso, Johann Tauler, and Jan van Ruysbroeck, all sought experiences in which their souls disappeared, leaving only the mind, emotion, or the will of God. In the 17th century, St. Teresa of Ávila, almost certainly in ignorance of historical precedents, demoted the communion described by St. Bernard to the status of a “spiritual betrothal,” instead emphasizing the soul’s disappearance in the “spiritual marriage.”

The complexity of the historical record is multiplied exponentially when one includes other religious traditions in the survey. Both Buddhism and Kabbala, the esoteric Jewish mysticism originating in the 12th century, emphasize nothingness rather than oneness, and the notion of oneness itself has many varieties in both Christianity and Hinduism. These facts are inconsistent with the postulation of a single unity or oneness that mystics everywhere experience or perceive. It is not that the Absolute, the Infinite, or God is One, and mystics experience and perceive this truth. Rather, the data support a psychological interpretation regarding a tendency of the mind to unify its contents in different ways, resulting in slightly different experiences on different occasions. Mystics do not experience or perceive an objectively existing unity; rather they formulate their own experiential unities in different ways.

The traditional conception of mysticism was finally abandoned by academic scholars in the 1970s. Since then, some scholars have rejected the category of mysticism as a fiction, while others have enlarged it to encompass all religious uses of alternate states of consciousness.

Mysticism as experience and interpretation

South Asian traditions

Some mysticism can indeed be defined successfully in terms of the experience or perception of unity with the divine. In Hinduism, for example, the hymns of the Rigveda were composed in Sanskrit by members of the Indo-European population that entered the northern plains of India from Central Asia beginning about 1500 bce. In the Vedic religion the chief gods were Indra, the king of the gods; Agni, the fire god; and Soma, the god associated with the hallucinogenic soma plant. (The botanical identity of soma has been lost, but it was possibly the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria.) The major practice of Vedic religion was a sacrificial meal that the community shared with the gods, or devas. Milk, clarified butter, curds, grains, the soma plant, and domestic animals were immolated in fire. The person who drank the hallucinogenic soma beverage was considered a sacrifice to the gods. He acquired intuitive, mystical insight and became one with the ancient primordial Man, who in the Vedic creation myth had been divided into the many phenomena of the cosmos.

A soma sacrifice in Pune (Poona), India.C.M. Natu

The Rigveda contains other examples of mystical experience. One hymn mentions long-haired ascetics (kesin) or silent ones (muni), who were either naked or dressed in red. In their ecstasies they were “possessed by the gods” and able to fly outside their bodies. Their ecstasies were induced by a drug (siva) that they consumed with the god Rudra. In post-Vedic times, Rudra was known as Shiva, who was associated with the hallucinogenic plants of the genus Datura.

A dramatic change in Indian mysticism is indicated in the Sanskrit texts known as the Upanishads, which were composed between 600 and 300 bce. The Maitri Upanishad outlined a practice of Yoga (a practical and theoretical system of ancient Indian philosophy) that consisted of breath control, the withdrawal of the senses (the voluntarily induced loss of sense perception), meditation, concentration, reasoning, and absorption. The goal of Upanishadic Yoga was to realize the identity of the personal self with the cosmic self, or atman, and the identity of atman with brahman, or the divine essence. The divine essence in purest form was conceived as vak (Sanskrit: “sound”); it developed secondarily into sacred sounds, such as AUM, and only thereafter into coherent words. Meditating on and uttering the sacred syllable were considered a means of inducing a mystical union with the divine essence. Once union was achieved, the self and all existence were seen to be divine. As noted in the Brihadaranyka Upanishad, “Verily, by the seeing of, by the hearing of, by the thinking of, by the understanding of the Atman, all this [phenomenal world] is known.”

The Yoga-sutras, written by Patanjali sometime between 200 bce and 400 ce, are the most authoritative formulation of classical Yoga, which is also known as Raja (“Royal”) Yoga. Patanjali’s practice deleted the element of reasoning from Upanishadic Yoga while adding three preparatory components: self-restraint (from violence, falsehood, theft, incontinence, and acquisitiveness), commitment (to purity, contentment, austerity, self-study, and devotion to the Lord), and bodily postures. Doctrinally, Patanjali broke with the Vedic and Upanishadic belief that all existent things are a single substance that is God; he instead favoured an uncompromising transcendentalism. He advised the practitioner (Yogi) to meditate one-pointedly on anything and everything. In each case, the Yogi would find that the object of meditation became the all, absorbed the self, and became evident as divine. Since different things were each the all, the self, and divine, it became logically necessary to postulate an unmanifest source or cause of the Yogic experience of absorption. A Yogi was consequently directed to meditate on the unmanifest that is beyond union. When the unmanifest was experienced contemplatively, it was found to be the soul or self (purusha; literally “spirit”) and was identified with a personified God (Ishvara; “Lord”).

While pursuing these attainments, a Yogi would inevitably acquire one or more siddhas (“powers”), such as knowledge of past lives, foreknowledge of one’s own death, great strength, supernormal senses, levitation, and omniscience. Although the siddhas could be distractions from the goal of moksha (Sanskrit: “release”), or liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth (seereincarnation), they were recognized as positive acquisitions.

Bhakti (“devotion”), a religious movement that emerged in India in the 7th to 10th centuries, stressed love of the gods Vishnu and Shiva and of the divine energy or goddess Shakti. Vishnu is conceptualized as sat (Sanskrit: “being”), cit (“consciousness”), and ananda (“bliss”). Devotees of Vishnu, known as Vaishnavites, may practice Yoga in order to experience pure consciousness, which contains all things and is identified with Vishnu himself. In other instances, Vaishnavite bhakti aims at more-limited manifestations of Vishnu, such as a vision of his feet, his arms, or his smiling face. Devotion to Vishnu may also be directed to his avatar (incarnation) Krishna. Meditations on the divinity at the source of all things, amid weeping, singing, and dancing, may aim at self-surrender to blissful possession by Krishna.

Shiva is similarly conceptualized as pure consciousness, but in a fashion that integratesbhakti with Yoga or with the Tantric (esoteric) religious practices of some Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina sects. Tantric mysticism may have originated historically as ritual male copulation with women who were possessed by goddesses. Through the addition of Yoga, the divine marriage was internalized as an event within the Yogi. Tantric Yoga may be performed during sexual intercourse or independently. In both events, Shiva is conceptualized as the pure consciousness that is all things. It is further held that the Yogi’s subtle body (a metaphysical aspect of the person that is present at all times and visible in some dreams and alternate states) contains three vertical channels (nadi) that pass through seven centres (chakras; Sanskrit: “wheel”), from the genital regions to the top of the skull. A subtle energy, called kundalini and regarded simultaneously as Shakti and as the sperm of Shiva, is raised through Tantric Yoga practices along the central channel through the chakras. In the process, the practitioner rises together with the kundalini, achieving immortality and acquiring magical powers.

In Tantric mysticism the body of the deity may be visualized as being composed of alphabetic letters or as assuming a specific posture—holding a jar of nectar or a book, for example. The mental image serves as a focus for the contemplation of pure consciousness, and a mystical reduction of experience to pure consciousness may ensue. The ultimate reducibility of everything to pure consciousness, belief in which is shared by Vaishnavism and Shaivism, can be seen as a logical compromise between the Upanishadic union of all being and the Yogic quest for a unique transcendence of being. Hindu mysticism in its various forms identifies the unitive as antithetical to the material world.

Unlike the Hindu traditions, the Daoist mysticism of China locates the unitive in the perceptible world. The Dao (Chinese: “way” or “road”) is both transcendent and immanent, both spiritual and material. The Dao is unnameable and ineffable, yet it is present in and as all things. Although lay Daoists do not necessarily seek mystical experiences, for initiated Daoist priests the whole of Daoism is mystical. The mystical nature of Daoism is indicated in the “sacrifice of writings,” which is performed in a temple or other designated area. The ritual space contains a stepped altar that represents a mountain. The gods are assembled on the north, east, and west of the altar, and venerated dead and lesser spirits occupy the south wall. The chief cantor chants formulas of invocation, consecration, purification, elevation, and confession while beating rhythmically on a wooden block. The priest, who is called a Great Master, murmurs sacred formulas, makes hidden finger gestures in the sleeves of his robe and signs in the air with incense smoke, and breathes in and out facing the different directions. While performing these actions, he cultivates a mystical experience. He meditates on the words that the cantor recites. Summoning the 24 energies of his body, he inhales, directing his breath and energies from a point situated between his eyebrows and his lower abdomen, which are known as the Upper Palace and the Cinnabar Field, respectively.

The priest then picks up the incense burner and lights it while meditating on another text that the cantor chants. At a certain point in the text, the priest redirects his breathing and energies to the Upper Palace and imagines the colours blue-black, yellow, and white. He turns toward his birth star and contemplates each of 36 gods as the name of the god is recited. At the end of this rite, he puts a pin shaped like a flaming pearl in his crown, signifying the lighting of the incense burner in the Cinnabar Field within his body.

In his visionary experience, the priest transforms his energies and body into the gods of his pantheon. He speaks their names and meditates on them individually, arranges them in order of rank, and creates a procession that moves with him in his inner experience to the gates of heaven. When the priest reaches the proximity of the Golden Gate of heaven, he dismisses the emissary spirits in his vision and performs a physical ritual. When he holds out his arms, his assistants take his sword and bowl of lustral water and hand him a tablet. After walking in the pattern of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), the priest prostrates himself in a fetal position, with his face resting on his hands, which continue to hold the tablet. He envisions a newborn child in the Cinnabar Field and meditates on his heart, where he finds a newborn child, called the True Person, who is escorted by two generals in military garb. The priest then visualizes the group standing at dawn on a terrace. Other generals escort them as they climb a 12-story tower that is the priest’s trachea and present themselves at his throat, which is the Pass of the Tiger and the Leopard. They proceed into his mouth, nose, and eyes, which are the Gates of the Sun and Moon. From a point between the priest’s eyebrows, they proceed to the top of his head, where they enter the cavity inside his crown, which is again the Golden Gate. There the True Person presents the memorial to the Heavenly Chancellors and turns back. On the way back he appears as an old man, the Great Lord of Long Life, and he slowly descends to merge into the Cinnabar Field that is his place of origin.

Many other Daoist rites are similarly performances for the laity, in which a cantor and other assistants help a priest cultivate a mystical experience. In keeping with the unitive ideology at the core of Daoist thought, the priest’s experience is not an instance of timeless, unchanging oneness. It is a rapidly changing vision of a spiritual journey into the sky that is conceptualized in a unitive way. The locations of the journey are both in the sky and within the priest’s body, as though the priest were a macroanthropos—a cosmic man who houses the heavens within his head. The ideology—it cannot accurately be called a theology or a philosophy—unites the cosmos and the body to such an extent that the ideology enters into the content of the vision near the vision’s end, when bodily parts are understood conceptually as the celestial locations into which they are rapidly transformed. The thoroughgoing mesh of visionary experience and unitive ideology in Daoism makes it impractical to restrict the term mystical to unitive experiences while treating visions as a separate category. It would be equally arbitrary to impose such a distinction in the case of shamanism.

Widely practiced in the world’s hunting cultures, shamanism may be the oldest mystical tradition. At the centre of the religion is the shaman, an ecstatic figure, male or female, who is thought to heal the sick and communicate with the spirit world. A shaman may address a question in thought to his “helping spirit” and then experience ideas that are interpreted as the spirit’s response to the question. A shaman may also summon a spirit to enter his body, and the spirit may speak through the shaman’s mouth. On such occasions the shaman controls both himself and the spirit that lodges in and manifests itself through his body. In other cases a shaman absorbs his helping spirit, gaining its faculties, capacities, or powers.

Tungus shaman, detail of an engraving from Nicholaas Witsen's Noord en Oost Tartarye (“North and East Tartary”), 1785.Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.

A shaman who incorporates a hostile god or spirit may in alternating moments be in control of the situation, housing a raging metaphysical being within his body, and in other moments lose control and be possessed by the being. In Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey, Menelaus is implicitly in such a mixed state of uncontrolled possession and controlled incorporation when he wrestles with Proteus, the old man of the sea, and forces him to prophesy.

In deep trances, when a shaman is oblivious to physical reality, he may undertake a “spirit journey.” In a vivid continuous visionary state, the shaman experiences himself in disembodied form, flying away from the place of the séance to a distant location to visit ghosts, spirits, or gods.

The examples of shamanism and Hindu and Daoist mysticism demonstrate the difficulty in establishing a single definition of mysticism. Definitions of mysticism in terms of unitive experiences must include spirit possession within their scope, while leaving Daoism out of account. Definitions that emphasize unitive ideologies are able to include Daoism but exempt shamanism from consideration, even though many Daoist visions are variants of shamanic soul flights. To resolve the problem of definition, scholars of comparative mysticism have opted for inclusive approaches that discuss religious uses of alternate states of consciousness without further qualifications.

The location of mysticism in religion

An important variable among mystical practices is the extent to which mystical experiences and ideologies are integrated into the religious tradition or broader spirituality of the practitioner. In Christianity, for example, mysticism may be practiced from late adolescence onward, but it is pursued chiefly by monks and nuns who form communities apart from their coreligionists. Their mystical experiences are pursued in private.

Christianity is not alone in segregating mysticism from its mainstream religious practice. In Hinduism, Yoga is pursued by adult males of the Brahman (priestly) caste after they abandon their families and retire to become forest dwellers. In Buddhism, Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha (c. 6th–4th century bce), rejected the Upanishadic belief that all things are a single substance that is God and instead advanced the concept of anatta (Pali: “non-self”). His rejection of the identity of atman and brahman coincided with his renunciation of the caste system and his introduction of an egalitarian model of community, the sangha. Because all is unreal, unreliable, and an illusion (maya), caste and the Hindu divinity of the self may be dismissed as fallacies.

Reclining Buddha, Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka.Richard Abeles/Rex USA

The performances of shamans and Daoist priests, by contrast, are almost always conducted for the benefit of an audience. Shamans’ séances are devoted to healing their coreligionists, ending famines and adverse weather, finding lost articles and people, and so forth. Daoist priests perform highly varied rites on behalf of their coreligionists. Although shamans and Daoist priests occasionally experience private ecstasies, they are primarily professional ecstatics whose mysticism is a component of group religious activities. Practices that laypeople witness in nonmystical states are conducted in alternate states of consciousness by these professional ecstatics. Although vision quests, in which individuals seek to interact with a guardian spirit, are sometimes pursued by laity in religions that have shamans, the layperson gradually improves at the practice, ultimately attracting a following and becoming a professional.

Mysticism has influenced other religious traditions as well. The Kabbala, a school of Jewish mysticism that dates from the late 12th century, had an important impact on the subsequent development of Judaism. From the 12th through the 14th century, Kabbalists interpreted Jewish practices in a new light and so transformed them into mystical rites and customs. In the Iggeret ha-Kodesh (“The Holy Epistle”), for example, sexual intercourse in marriage was interpreted as a theurgical practice in which masculine and feminine hypostases (aspects) of the divine were brought into conjunction through appropriate meditations during sexual activity. Beginning in the 15th century, Kabbalists devised original rites of mystical character, some of which found their way into common Jewish usage. Most famously, the song “Lekhah dodi” (“Let Us Walk, My Love”), which greets the arrival of the feminine hypostasis, was composed by mystics in the town of Ẕefat in Upper Galilee. Its popularity led to its inclusion in the standard prayer books of Jews internationally.

Like the Kabbala, Sufism was grafted onto a religion (Islam) that was previously nonecstatic. The earliest Sufis were ascetics rather than mystics, and the earliest Sufi mystics were isolated individuals. As the movement grew in size, however, its social organization developed in two directions. Some individuals formed and belonged to Sufi orders, which are formal organizations that teach and perform specific approaches to Islamic mysticism. Less formally, however, groups of ordinary people—who may be acquainted, for example, through a local mosque—spend an hour or more together at a time, engaged communally in learning, prayer, and meditation.